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Cheap Seats 2024 By Rich Trzupek


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Cheap Seats 2022 By Rich Trzupek

Cancel Away - 04/13


By Rich Trzupek
  Both my esteemed publisher of the Mighty Examiner and my perhaps slightly less esteemed self take guilty pleasure whenever someone writes us to demand that The Examiner should never, ever sully their doorstep again. This spares them the mighty effort of disposing of one of the dozens pieces of unasked for bits of printed material they receive every week.
  What offends these unique consumers is not the fact that they have received an unsolicited message, but that a portion – and a relatively small portion – of that message should dare to include an opinion or opinions with which they do not entirely agree.
  Today’s version of the classic Puritan employs a cancel culture that demands it is not sufficient for consumers of information to ignore, or to ingest and subsequently dismiss, opinions of which they do not agree. Only those purveyors of information deemed to be pure should be allowed to distribute information.
  This is the High Priest culture. It’s the culture that creates as much damage in the current era as the High Priests of yore. Consider he High Priests of the New York Times, by way of example. They have only recently and reluctantly admitted they might have been in error after spending four years attacking Donald Trump’s supposed Russian connections, while simultaneously dismissing the damning contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop as fraudulent. The High Priests at CNN and MSNBC have yet to catch up, but one can hope.
  If you choose to entirely trust your High Priest, you have a decision to make. Choose to believe your High Priest infallible, as most of the Jewish people chose to do 2,000 years ago. Alternatively, you can find a new High Priest. If you find the Essenes too austere, give the Sadducees a try.
  In this age of communication, the world is drowning in High Priests. As I have noted before, anyone who believes a particular thing can find an “expert” who agrees with them. When everything is believable, nothing can be believed. Two plus two cannot equal three or five, no matter how many people with doctorates in mathematics assure us it is so.
  When canceling delivery of this publication, the most common reason cited is the Examiner’s “lack of balance”. That is a remarkable statement. Do these people demand balance from MSNBC or CNN? I see enough of their work to conclude that if balanced journalism happens there, it is merely by accident, not by design. The same may be said of the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and many another MSM outlet.
  I don’t begrudge anyone their bias. Just because I disagree with a particular position that MSNBC promotes does not mean that they ought not be allowed to promote it. Nor do I find it beneficial to me to ignore their position. True progress occurs not when we all agree about what opinion is “true,” but when we challenge truisms – both those with which we agree and those with which we do not.
  What truly troubles the cancelers, in my opinion, is not their desire for uniformity, but their yearning for simplicity. A person may understand that the climate change debate involves potentially ruinous economics as much as it does potentially catastrophic weather. They may understand that it can be argued that protecting certain classes based on identity may do more to divide than to unite. They may understand that most every great issue of any age has been a coin with two sides and that there was at least some merit in each most of the time.
  They may understand all that, but they don’t want to think about it. They want the science settled. They want America to be a racist patriarchy that needs fixing. They want everyone to agree that gender is a matter of self-perception, not biology. What they don’t want to is listen to contrary arguments, particularly if those arguments are persuasive and articulately presented.
  Yet, they are human and humans are naturally curious. So they can not simply skip over the Cheap Seats in order to read an account of the local high school’s prowess on the volleyball court. If they can’t ignore that with which they disagree, then they feel obligated to pretend that opinion does not exist.
  It’s a sad commentary on our times. The phrase “preaching to the choir” was once taken as criticism. Now days, it’s almost a requirement.
  Email: richtrzupek@gmail.com




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